As early as the year 1828, the Hudson Bay Company saw the value of the Falls of the Willamette at Oregon City for manufacturing purposes, and took possession of the same; as Governor Simpson in command of the Company said, "To establish a British Colony of their retired servants." "Governor Simpson," says Dr. Eells in his "History of Indian Missions," "said in 1841 that the colonists in the Willamette Valley were British subjects, and that the English had no rivals on the coast but Russia, and that the United States will never possess more than a nominal jurisdiction, nor will long possess even that, on the west side of the Rocky Mountains." And he added, "Supposing the country to be divided to-morrow to the entire satisfaction of the most unscrupulous patriot in the Union, I challenge conquest to bring my prediction and its own power to the test by imposing the Atlantic tariff on the ports of the Pacific." Such sentiments from the Governor, the man then in supreme power, who moulded and directed English sentiments, is of deep significance. A man only second in influence to Governor Simpson and even a much broader and brainier man, Dr. John McLoughlin, Factor of the Company, "said to me in 1842," says Dr. Eells, "that in fifty years the whole country will be filled with the descendants of the Hudson Bay Company." But while they believed, just as the American immigrants did, that as a result of the Treaty of 1818-28, the country would belong to the nationality settling it; yet they had so long held supreme power that they were slow to think that such power was soon to pass from them. That the diplomacy of the home Government, the bold methods and "The shrewdness, daring and commercial activity in the heads" of the Rulers, that the Edinburgh Review pictures, were all to be thwarted and that speedily, had not entered into their calculations, and they did not awake to a sense of the real danger until those hundred and twenty-five wagons, loaded with live Americans and their household goods, rolled down the mountain sides and into the Valley of the Willamette on that memorable October day, 1843. It was America's protest, made in an American fashion. It settled the question of American interests as far as Americans could settle it under the terms of the Treaty of 1818, as they understood it. Under the full belief that Whitman would bring with him a large delegation, the Americans met and organized before he reached Oregon. And when the Whitman caravan arrived, they outnumbered the English and Canadian forces three to one; and the Stars and Stripes were run up, never again to be hauled down by any foreign power in all the wide domain of Oregon.